Mr. Brooks Reminisces

...Instead of trying to dig out influences, he talks of the "unfathomable mystery" of "the Zeitgeist that causes young men of an epoch to act in the same fashion, to follow the same way of life without knowing one another or even discussing their tastes or their hopes or their plans...

...when the road forked, he took the almost abandoned path that skirted the hopeful democratic heights of America's pre-industrial philosophers, instead of the crowded road through the hollows of twentieth-century despair...

...and when for the word 'England' one substituted 'Europe,' with the Middle Ages and the history of art, one had the Harvard temper that I knew well...

...In 1937, Malcolm Cowley dedicated a volume of critical essays entitled After the Genteel Tradition: "To Van Wyck Brooks??who will not agree with some of our ideas, but who nevertheless helped us to reach them...

...If life was not good, if America had not kept its promises, the job of the artist was to show that life could be made good and the promises could be kept...

...Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that he looked at American writers of the preceding century and recreated their careers and milieux without any attempt at critical judgment...

...Thus, the young esthete who was steeped in Ruskin and had traveled more in Europe than in America was prepared to find Harvard not the college of William James, "the post-Protestant believer in mankind," but the college of George Santayana, "the post-Catholic reactionary" who "always looked down his nose" at his democratic, American fellow-philosopher...

...He gives us scenes and portraits along the way, but they are entrancing rather than illuminating...

...Scenes and portraits were the essence of Brooks's literary histories...

...By the time he was 28, Brooks had published five volumes, some of them slim, none very influential...

...Here he grew up amid a part of late-nineteenth-century American society that was strangely unaware that the fuses it had ignited were almost burned to their explosive ends??the women and children seemed not to know about the explosives at all, the men not to remember the sputtering fuses, if indeed they ever heard them, after they had stepped off the 5:06...

...Reviewed by John Lydenberg Visiting Lecturer in English, University of Minnesota "Not to be writing a book was not to be alive at all," Van Wyck Brooks decided while he was teaching at Stanford University shortly after finishing Harvard in 1907...

...Whatever the mysterious forces at work, Plain-field and Harvard provided the background for America's Coming-of-Age, the document that so well expressed the young writers' revolt against "puritanism" and vulgar commercialism, and their dream of reshaping their society into a democratic socialist commonwealth in which no the Philistine but the artist would find his spiritual home...

...Since he is fortunately only 68 now and still very much alive, we can expect many more books from him...

...Brooks, then, grew up and was educated as one of the old Americans, the "insiders" who wanted only to be outside...

...But he does give the impression that the influence of Plainfield was as great as any other in giving him strength to continue on his lonely way instead of following those who had once been his followers into the slough of despond...

...Yeats loved life and humanity...

...Brooks never explains precisely what he retained from that tradition, as he never here discusses or analyzes ideas at all...

...Thus, one of the book's heroes is the painter John Butler Yeats, father of William Butler, who had come to New York on a visit at 70 and refused to return to Ireland because he found the city and its country exciting, alive and hopeful...

...Husbands and fathers might travel west on business, but the whole family looked east toward "Europe" for their cultural values...

...The young rebel who had so sternly rejected the American past now appeared as the middle-aged conservative who looked at our literary heritage and found it good...

...When he left college to start his career, he assumed "that the only chance an American had to succeed as a writer was to betake himself [to Europe] with all possible speed...

...He who had been a leader of the new came to be regarded as a relic of the past...

...Then, after five years' silence, he came back to life with a book that opened a second career...

...Grim as were his accounts of late-nineteenth-century life in America in the books on Twain and James, Brooks's goal was never negation but affirmation...

...in this first autobiographical volume, he applies to his own childhood and youth the technique he so wonderfully perfected in the preceding works...

...In this light, Brooks's surrender of leadership appears a logical development rather than a reversal...

...Then, between 1915 and 1927 he published six more, establishing himself as a leader of the new American writers who were in revolt against what they deemed the aridity of their forebears' writing and the sterility of their own society...

...He makes us see (we always see, and almost never feel, in these books) his home town, Plainfield, N. J., as a genteel Wall Street suburb in which Dreiser's businessmen, off duty, live peacefully with Howells's women and children...

...This was the Norton who never set foot in England without feeling that he was at last at home, he said...

...So he gave up teaching and rejected a career in publishing, those natural resorts of college graduates who yearn for the literary life, and wrote and wrote...

...It was the temper of Henry Adams, who had lost all hope for the modern world and saw nothing in the American scene but 'degradation,' while, like Norton, he also preached the gospel of medievalism as an escape from the vulgarity of the American present...

...This book suggests that the genteel tradition possessed certain virtues that we today seldom see because??and partly because of Van Wyck Brooks??we have been taught to repudiate it in toto...

...How he came to wash off the protecting oil of the Nortons and Santayanas and soak himself in the American scene Brooks never explains...

...They saw the pattern established by the women at home, rather than that set by men's financial and industrial occupations, as the lasting pattern...

...These books included his call to literary arms ?? America's Coming-of-Age??and the biographical studies of Mark Twain and Henry James that were designed to show how uncongenial American commercialism had been to the development of an American literature...

...They thought they lived in "a stable world...

...sin was but one part of man, and he could recognize it without imagining it to be all, just as he saw and hated America's materialism without losing sight of its wonderful variety and vitality...

...He was receptive to Irving Babbitt, with "his curiously inhuman brand of humanism," and to "Charles Eliot Norton, whose mind looked backward in time and across the sea...

...Where his earlier writings had been full of generalizations and judgments and homilies, he now eschewed almost everything except the concrete, the particular details carefully arranged to make a picture of the writers' lives and times...

...He neither retreated nor abandoned his course...

...The Flowering of New England was the first of the "Makers and Finders" series of literary histories that Brooks completed two years ago with The Confident Years: 1885-1915...